iNaturalist

“iNaturalist is a lot of different things, but at its core,

iNaturalist is an online social network of

people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature

It’s also a crowdsourced species identification system and an organism occurrence recording tool.This collaborative system assists nature lovers to network and share spatial data of species as well as assisting with correctly identifying species names of plants, animals, fungi and insects.

Despite the fact that iNat may seem to be a bit technical and scientific , our primary goal in operating iNaturalist is to connect people to nature. By that we mean getting people to feel that the non-human world has personal significance, and is worth protecting. We have a pretty nerdy way of doing that, of course, but we really believe that recording information about nature in a social context is a tremendous way to understand the awesome depth and breadth of life on Earth.

Our secondary goal is to generate scientifically valuable biodiversity data from these personal encounters. We believe iNat can achieve both of these goals simultaneously – in fact that they reinforce one another – but when we get pulled in conflicting directions, we measure success by our primary goal. If we connect people to nature without contributing to any specific scientific outcomes or quantifiable conservation results, then we’re still doing our job, but if we just contribute to science without helping people care about the natural world, we’ll be on the wrong track.” (Scott Loarie)

We actively encourages people to partake in our project, the Garden Route Botanical Garden Biodiversity, that was started by GRBG volunteer Colin Ralston. The project aims to identify, list, and describe the rich biodiversity of fauna and flora that occur within the boarders of the Garden Route Botanical Garden.